Another kind of human tower

We went to Escales this evening for the last show of the Centre Culturel season, held outdoors. The first half was a pair of acrobats. The audience was invited to huddle closely in a circle around them, seated on the ground,  and they then erected a completely free-standing tree trunk, followed by a larger one, then the one in my blip. The audience had to keep shuffling back out of the way ... I ended up getting up and sitting much further away. There were lots of oohs and ahs from the crowd is they scrambled up the wobbling trunk in various configurations, before doing some ground-based acrobatics. This did remind us of the castellers, without the solidarity.

I wasn't that keen on their show; I've seen better acrobats. But we'd really come for the second half -- a one-man show by Patrick de Valette of the comedy group les Chiche Capon. He is the maddest of a very mad crew, and we adored them from the moment we first saw them, years ago. He is very much more spectacular than the acrobats were. He started out in a white lab coat, swiftly ripped off to reveal a red tutu, in turn discarded to display bright red Y-fronts. A few more costume changes followed as he played a professor explaining evolution. During which he imitated among other things an amoeba, a bacterium, an octopus, a lizard, and an ostrich. He has a face and angular, flexible body made for comedy and the audience was soon helpless with laughter. I have the impression he always ends his shows in a similar way, since this is the second time we've seen him stripped down to a flesh-coloured jockstrap, crowd-surfing. I swear he'd be in a mental hospital if he didn't have this outlet. You have to be there really -- I can't explain it! But here's a video taster.

Wine and nibbles afterwards -- we chatted to a couple of people we know, but it was getting chilly as the sun went down, so off home.